Against Relativism

Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical Theory

On Deconstructionist Realism

Christopher Norris is a professor of philosophy at the University of
Wales-Cardiff. This is the latest in a series of books and collections of his
essays whose thrust is telegraphed by their titles --- Uncritical Theory,The Truth about
Postmodernism,Reclaiming the Truth,New Idols of the
Cave, etc. Norris, as might be imagined, is in favor of the Truth,
and he likes Reality and Reason too, though generally without the capital
letters. In fact Norris is a flat-out scientific realist, and thinks that
quarks and leptons (for example) really exist and are more or less as
advertised in the Particle Properties Data
Booklet. He entertains grave suspicions about instrumentalists, who
regard scientific notions as more or less convenient fictions, more or less
useful conceptual tools --- for how could they be so convenient if they
weren't, pretty much, true? For cognitive relativists, who are (these days)
claiming that scientific ideas are convenient fictions alright, convenient for
capitalism, patriarchy, the military-industrial complex, and the other usual
suspects, he has unmitigated contempt. I share all these convictions, of
course, but I'm less serious about them than Norris is, since I don't rub
shoulders with those who disagree on a daily basis.

What sets Norris apart from your garden variety anti-relativist is his
passionate commitment to the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man,
to whom he has devoted a book each (plus
several books on deconstruction-in-general). In fact, he goes so far as to
claim that Derrida and de Man, properly understood (by Norris, for one) are
actually on the side of the angels, or at any rate that of the decent
materialists and realists. There is a certain piquancy to seeing the whole
apparatus of trace, differance, aporia, etc., etc. being turned
against various and sundry Foucauldians, social constructivists, "strong"
sociologists of knowledge, Richard Rorty, post-modernists, Heideggarians,
practical manglers, etc., and it's amusing to watch Norris flail at,
essentially, everyone else who cites Derrida as an authority for getting him
so flagrantly and ridiculously wrong. Far be it from me to take a side in this
quarrel.

The book under review is a collection of essays, mostly previously published
in various learned journals. These are written to explode relativism by
showing that arguments advanced in its favor are tosh, or to castigate writers
(Quine, Kuhn, van
Frassen) who, while not relativists themselves, have propounded influential
arguments which relativists have used, or to expound the thoughts of Derrida
and de Man on realism. There is a great deal of overlap and repetition between
the essays, entirely natural in their original setting, but not corrected here.

There is also a vast amount of repetition within each essay. When
Norris wants to argue some point, he begins by stating some premise, and then
re-stating it, and then re-stating it again, tweaking it slightly each time,
and giving more or less (generally less) explicit justification for the change,
until he finally drifts into his conclusion. Not especially concise to begin
with, this diffusive procedure gives him one of the lowest densities of
argumentation per page of any philosophical writer who does, in fact, argue.
That initial premise is often taken from some other writer; in these exegetical
cases it is sometimes very hard to tell when Norris is speaking on behalf of
the author he is interpreting, and when he is speaking to us in his own voice.
I sympathize, since I have (as constant readers have pointed out) the same
problem, but sympathy doesn't inhibit annoyance.

One needn't write obscurely about obscure writers: vide Kolakowski on Husserl, or Norris himself on
Heidegger. Thus I get suspicious when the glass darkens, which it does
whenever Derrida and de Man are invoked, which is also when Norris goes into
full-throttle exegesis. "These statements [about Pascal's style and his
contrast between "real" and "nominal" definitions] are characteristic of
`late' de Man in the impression they give of raising fundamental issues in a
style of extreme elliptical precision which somehow omits --- or disdains to
make explicit --- the most crucial argumentative moves" [p. 51]. This is
extremely charitable, both in conceding precision, and in supposing that those
key moves were made. Far be it from me to dispute that de Man is elliptical,
disdainful of his readers, and talking about a very important problem --- here,
the relation between empirical knowledge, and the kind we have in math, logic,
and other pure deductive systems. That he gets us any further in understanding
this nasty mess is altogether a separate question. The best evidence I can see
that he does is that Norris, a smart and well-read man, says so with
every sign of sincere conviction. I note that many people who have read these
authors have concluded that they're relativists at best, but that Norris does
not take them to task for this, as (in the analogous situations) he chides
Quine and Kuhn.

Maybe the deconstructionist masters really are as much in favor of truth and
reality as Norris wants us to believe; maybe they support motherhood and apple
pie, too; maybe not; howsoever, to paraphrase Leszek Kolakowski's remark about
Marx and democracy, there are better arguments in favor of reason and realism
than the fact that Derrida is not quite so hostile to them as he at first
appears. The one which Norris hammers home in this book is the one compressed
into Richard Dawkins's quip that "there are no social constructivist at
30,000 feet", and Ian Hacking's dictum about positrons: "if you can spritz
something with them, then they are real". That is: if science really was just
so much ideological baffle-gab, why would it work, which it very, very
plainly does? And it doesn't just work in technological applications,
convincing though those are; even very recondite and conceptual aspects of
sciences like special relativity and quantum mechanics can have observational,
empirical consequences. (Curiously, for all his interest in quantum mechanics,
Norris seems unaware of recent relevant work by physicists on topics such as
decoherence and the measurement problem; nor that we never talk about
"complementarity" any more, thank the gods.) Of course this doesn't mean
that the sciences haven't also been tools of capitalism, imperialism,
and all the rest: but the reason chemistry is a much better tool of
imperialist domination than alchemy is that it's much more true. (He doesn't
put it quite that way.)

Norris has an excellent dissection of the relativist position which Larry
Laudan has called "skepticism about everything except the social sciences."
This is the idea that, while reliable scientific knowledge is unobtainable,
reliable knowledge of the social, political and psychological motivations of
scientists is so easily obtained it can be laid on with a shovel. Whether
(say) an air-pump actually creates a partial vacuum or not is unknowable; what
led some centuries-dead people to agree to or dissent from this proposition can
be determined with precision and certainty and set forth in a book which can be
read over a weekend. In a related vein, Norris has re-analyzed some
case-studies beloved of cognitive relativists in some depth, coming, naturally,
to different conclusions. Another very interesting study is on the development
of jet engines, which relativists don't talk about, but which should worry them
a good deal.

I will now pick a number of nits.

Norris talks about Gödel's Theorem, of course. His basic point is
right: it does not spell the end of mathematical knowledge, much less
complete epistemic free-for-all. The theorem (in the strengthened version of
Quine) asserts that, in any consistent axiomatic system in which we can
construct basic arithmetic, there will be at least one true but unprovable
statement. (The condition can fail in two ways: either the system is too dumb
to be able to count, or it's inconsistent.) As Jaako Hintikka notes, this is strictly equivalent
to asserting that there is no computer program which, if we let it run forever,
would spit out all and only the true statements of that system, but the first
way of putting it sounds much sexier. Norris gets this right (pretty
much) in two of the three essays where it comes up. On p. 22, however, he
gives the following gloss on the theorem: "there will always exist at least
one indispensable axiom whose validity cannot be proved in terms of that same
system." This is bizarre, since, in the first place, the true theorem (which,
I repeat, Norris gets right elsewhere) is about what can be proved starting
from the axioms, not whether the axioms themselves can be proved, and, in the
second place, if we could prove an axiom using the others, we'd call
it a theorem and remove it from our list of axioms! Note that the analogy
Norris draws (a loose one, by his own admission) to Derrida's idea that every
philosophical system relies on at least one ineliminable metaphor would
collapse if we substituted the true theorem for the mutilated one.

Norris objects to the semantic notion of truth (the notion that the sentence
"Ripe cherries are red" is true if and only if ripe cherries are red, and
similarly for other sentences and their "disquoted" counterparts), regarding
it as one step away from dissolving, in the hands of relativists, into no sort
of truth at all. So far as I could tell, the only support Norris offers for
this peculiar idea is that there is at least one relativist who agrees with
him. Matters are not helped by Norris's attempt to link this question to that
of whether there is anything to causality over and above "constant
conjunction," an invariant pattern of association or succession. If there is
an argument here, on either score, it is spread so thinly over his pages as to
be entirely indiscernible. I suspect there has been some massive failure of
communication here, and only become more suspicious when I find Norris calling
disquotation an "equivalence relation" (p. 140), since an equivalence
relation (as he must know) is one which is reflexive, symmetric and transitive,
and disquotation is plainly none of these things.

Some of Norris's statements about geometry lead me to suspect that he is
ignorant of Hilbert's great work on the formal nature of Euclidean geometry.
Generally, he could benefit from some exposure to model theory.

Norris spends part of an essay castigating Bertrand Russell's 1912 paper
"On the Notion of Cause," comparing it
unfavorably to Russell's 1948 book Human
Knowledge. The only problem with this contrast is that Russell
expounded basically the same theory of causation on both occasions. Rather
than actually reading the paper, Norris has evidently relied on two or three
often-quoted sentences --- most notably "The law of causality, I believe, like
much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age,
surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no
harm" --- which do not convey the distinction Russell drew the crude A-then-B
statements beloved of "philosophers and Papuans" like "fire burns cotton"
or "thrown rocks break windows," and the functional relationships actually
found in developed scientific theories. The major refinement in the
intervening years had to do with the very useful notion of "causal line,"
which Russell was using by 1927. --- This'd be
a minor point, were Norris not so given to chastising others for mis-reading
authors considerably easier to get wrong than Russell is.

Overall, it's good to have someone like Norris on the side of the Truth,
Reason and Reality, but this isn't really a book for anyone not already a
hardened addict of the science-versus-relativism genre. People coming
to this book without some acquaintance with both analytical philosophy of
science and post-structuralism are in for rough going. The main problem with
it is not so much the presence of Uncle Willard, or even that of Uncle Jacques,
as the awful style: lose that and we might have something here.